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by JimDabell
1831 days ago
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> The consoles are niche entertainment devices. They sell by the tens of millions. They are in no way “niche”. > Phones are not niche devices, they are ubiquitous and have killed whole industries like consumer photo/video equipment and portable audio. It wasn’t common for things like cameras to have open development platforms either. |
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There’re billions of active Android devices. That’s 2 orders of magnitude difference. Compared to these volumes, consoles are niche devices.
And don’t forget about alternatives. If you wanna play videogames you don’t have to buy a console, you can get a PC and buy Windows games from gog, steam, epic or origin. And in some cases like take-two directly from developer. And recently there were multiple attempts to make cloud gaming work, pretty sure some day someone will do that successfully.
Because customers have so many alternatives, xbox and playstation are not a monopoly despite MS/Sony are selling devices locked to their respective stores.
For smartphones, customers only have 2 alternatives. It’s for this reason apple and google are a monopoly, and we should treat them this way i.e. regulate the hell out of them.
> It wasn’t common for things like cameras to have open development platforms either.
I don’t think many people care about open platforms. They care about choice. Back in the days, if you didn’t like e.g. Sony pushing their overprices memory sticks, you could buy a camera that’s not Sony, there were many other good vendors on the market. Nowadays, the cameras are either prosumer and professional (i.e. expensive), or non-existent because smartphones killed them. And while there’re many companies making smartphones, all these smartphones are controlled by just two.